Nightclub Fantasies, Shattered

by Alexandra Molotkow

When I was a kid, I just wanted to dance at an actual nightclub. My concept of “fun” was formed in the ’90s, so my ideal of a night spot was shaped distantly by Peter Gatien, the guy behind Palladium, Club USA, The Tunnel, and Limelight. When I finally got my fake ID, I mostly hung out in dive bars, or basement death traps like Club 56. The best parties were attached to a person — Will Munro, whose Vazaleen events united Toronto’s queer, art, and punk scenes — rather than a place.

Nightclubs had bad associations, at least in Toronto, where on Friday nights the central club district filled up with drunk, hateful weekend warriors as likely to barf on as grope you, or scream terrible things about your face. Then, it happened: Peter Gatien was deported! And he landed in our city, where in 2007 he opened CiRCA, a 53,000-square-foot Megaclub in a space that had last housed a giant arcade. CiRCA was a giant arcade: oversize Kid Robot toys, “Sensacell” bars that alighted at the touch of your hand, dancers in Plexiglas cases.

When I visited on behalf of my student newspaper, I talked to Kenny Baird, the club’s art director, who had worked at Area back in its heyday. “It was a home for creative people to come out and sit down and have a conversation and see what opportunities opened up,” he told me. “Some junkie from the Lower East Side who’s 20 years old, who is going to be super famous in five years, talking to some 70-year-old woman from Europe who’s some countess. I mean, great opportunities. Magic time. That doesn’t happen anymore — everyone’s segregated, everyone’s in their own little scene.”

He didn’t seem particularly optimistic. “It’s just awful, watching a $3,000 piece of furniture get destroyed because some arsehole decided to jump up and down on it with his girlfriend on his head — you know, girls standing on the furniture in high heels while the security guard is standing around watching because they’ve got great plastic tits.” He explained, apologetically, that I’d caught him on a bad day. CiRCA lasted three years. It was never going to work, but in hindsight it was a lovely effort.

Recently, GQ ran an interview with Sven Marquardt, the bouncer at Berlin’s Berghain nightclub and the man in charge of its erratic door policy, which he declined to outline — “it’s subjective” — but managed to explain perfectly:

I feel like I have a responsibility to make Berghain a safe place for people who come purely to enjoy the music and celebrate — to preserve it as a place where people can forget about space and time for a little while and enjoy themselves. The club evolved from the gay scene in Berlin in the nineties. It’s important to me we preserve some of that heritage, that it still feels like a welcoming place for the original sort of club-goers. If we were just a club full of models, pretty people all dressed in black, it would be nice to look at for a half an hour, but God, that would be boring. It would feel less tolerant, too.

It stokes a deep sense of wonder to consider how one place can be a focal point for an entire scene, or sensibility, or provide a safe haven for marginalized people to be themselves and find each other. In Hot Stuff, her cultural history of disco, Alice Echols guides a tour of New York clubs in the era’s heyday — how they felt, what they meant, who they welcomed, who they excluded. She also talks about her experience DJing at the Rubaiyat, then the only disco in Ann Arbor:

The Rubaiyat’s crowd included flight attendants and librarians — a good number of them gay men — and lesbian-feminist bus drivers, some of whom moonlighted as prostitutes at a nearby massage parlor. You could say it was a gay bar, but that’s far too generic a description. The Rubaiyat was a flytrap for the fringe — snagging performance artists, con artists, and even Madonna Ciccone, who is said to have danced there before dropping out of U of M and heading off to New York.

The owner was a middle-aged Greek guy who, while “flamboyant… was emphatically not gay,” and although the place had “some pretensions to classiness… the mismatched, sagging booths and bordello red carpets defeated occasional efforts at upmarket sophistication. What the Rubaiyat did have were better-than-average speakers, a heterogeneous clientele, and a weekend cover of three dollars.”

Like a prillion others, I’ve imagined dancing at the Paradise Garage or sitting at Max’s Kansas City. As a teen I even daydreamed about Max Fish and, like, Kokie’s — places reliably fun, or at least interesting, just to stand inside of. I think I grew up too late: I don’t know for sure, but I have a hunch that the brick-and-mortar nightclub era is a thing of the past. It’s no longer the venue, but the party.

This is part of the modern condition of North American cities, where rents rise, and neighborhoods change, and buildings are bought out from under the scenes that made them at tape-scrambling speed. At the same time, buildings are expendable; you don’t need them to congregate. People find their communities online, and meet wherever: warehouses, Chinese restaurants, Latvian Orthodox community centers, some rich kid’s parents’ apartment. All that matters is the event.

In that way, maybe, venues have become like vinyl — more rarefied as they become less necessary — hence the whole “speakeasy” thing. It’s a great time for DIY venues, I think, but those tend to happen by chance: they depend on the ingenuity of a particular clique, or a loophole in housing policy, or the generosity of some wealthy kook, and then they’re done, and then there’s somewhere new.

I have no complaints. I like the serendipity of all this, the fact that you could end up anywhere. I am just a tiny bit nostalgic for a hideout.